In the popular eSports titles (LoL, Dota 2, SC2, CS GO and a few more) there are many competitive female teams and there are also many female tournaments. However, their skill level is simply far away from that of male teams and the female tournaments are also significantly smaller. But that's not really a problem.
What's really the problem is the sexism in the community. Often, female teams are only reduced to what their members look like. Going through commets (before the mods clean them up), you can see plenty of evidence of this.
Since I regularly play competitive (CS GO) myself with mixed teams, I just keep witnessing it over and over again. Once you hear a female voice in teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble (with VoIP you can't really hide your gender), there is surely gonna be at least one male players that's gonna make a comment.
Interestingly enough there seem to be many female gamers that kind of enjoy the extra attention too.
But still, there is a significant amount of male gamers that are simply sexist towards female gamers.
One very interesting case is that of the Canadian female SC2 pro gamer Sasha 'Scarlett' Hostyn. Currently she's considered the best foreigner by many (Koreans are Koreans and the rest of the world are foreigners in SC2, because Koreans dominate so hard and there are only few Non-Korean that can keep up with them... barely) She was born as a male, but feels as a female. Well sadly, there are many many male players that make a lot of fun of her.
On the CPU, it is trivial to write a triangle-fill algorithm that PERFECTLY anti-aliases the edges by calculating the exact percentage of a pixel the triangle edges cover. Amazingly, this option is NOT implemented in GPU hardware. GPU hardware uses the crude approach of pixel super-sampling- which can be thought of as an increase in the resolution of edge pixels. So, for instance, all 4x GPU anti-aliasing methods effectively increase the resolution of edge pixels by 2 (so a pixel becomes in some sense 2x2 pixels).
Edge coverage calculations, while trivial to implement in hardware, were never considered 'useful' in common GPU solutions.
You can do that with a fragment shader. It's most likely not going to be efficient. But certainly possible.
But that's one of the biggest benefits of GPU. It's not just the huge FLOPs number. It's to get people to think of implementing solutions in an efficient way.
GPUs are best at what's known as 'embarassingly parallel' problems which means that it's so easy to implement a problem in parallel that it's already embarassing. These days these problems are also known as 'perfectly parallel'. So the GPU forces people to try to come up with and think about solutions that fit this model.
Many are saying that the banks bent to the US, so the data-centers will too. However, there are a few problems with this comparison and I think it needs to be pointed out that it's quite a different case.
So Switzerland has had strong bank secrecy laws for years. Also, for years these bank secrecy laws have been heavily critisized all around the world. And for years Switzerland has made a lot of money with them, because clients used Swiss banks to avoid taxes, 'possibly' money laundering and such. So these laws have been looked at as rather negative.
So then the financial crisis hit and all of a sudden all the nations were looking for quick and easy money. The US, Germany and many more. Well, it turns out that you can quickly make some money by simply collecting all these taxes that you've missed out on for years. And I mean these clients that tried to avoid taxes by putting their money into Swiss banks simply did something illegal.
So the banks were pressured very hard to release the information. And banks are a very very big deal in Switzerland. I mean the UBS is huge for Switzerland. It's simply the 'too-big-to-fail' company in Switzerland. In order to 'save' the banking business Switzerland didn't have much of a choice then to simply give in.
Now le'ts look at the situation with data-centers: Firstly, they're far far away from being as big and important as the banks. If the trend keeps going then they will gain importance, but I doubt that data-centers will ever deal with as much money as banks.
Secondly, the privacy laws in Switzerland are not looked at as negative. Instead they're looked at as highly positive and this only got stronger with snowden's leak.
So with the bank secrecy laws it was like the world vs Switzerland. With the privacy laws it's more like the world behind Switzerland vs the US.
Of course with the privacy laws there is the problem that a lot of piracy may happen in those data-centers and that might give the US some attack surface. E.g. the Swiss based firm rapidshare gets under a lot of pressure because of that. But that can still be solved separately from privacy and I don't believe it's comparable to the bank secrecy situation.
And a word about the Swiss intelligence service: Compared to the NSA it's joke. Obviously the funding of the two isn't comparable at all. The local laws are completely different (we don't have any kind of patriot act).
Noticing an additional 20ms - 30ms of ping doesn't have anything to do with gamer's or humans' reaction time. Nobody will notice that some opponent dies 20ms - 30ms later than before.
You notice it because the gameplay simply feels differently.
FPS are the most sensitive to ping changes. RTS & Moba are much more forgiving when it comes to pings.
In FPS it feels like the bullets don't hit where they're supposed to. Let's say someone sees on his monitor how his crosshair was to the very left of his opponent's head, he shoots. Now in an additional 20ms - 30ms the opponent can move to the side just enough so that the bullets flies past him without hitting. You might also notice very small shitters in the opponents movement. That's probably because with a higher latency most people also get slightly more packet loss.
That's one of the biggest advantages of LAN parties, the gameplay simply feels fucking awesome compared to playing on the internet!
I've installed Ubuntu with gnome-shell for 3 computer illiterate friends. Once I've explained them that they should always work with the super key (on most keyboards windows key) and if they want to start something just type it into the startmenu (I also installed gnome-do on F4, because it's a little faster and I like it better), then they didn't have any problems with it at all. (One of that friend actually tried out unity too and even liked it!)
I remember when I first upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 (I think it was that one where gnome2 was removed and unity & gnome-shell were available), I was really disappointed and I really regretted having upgraded. But I gave it a shot and I started to like it. I often like to use it on my laptop when I'm traveling. (On my desktop I use the i3 tiling window manager, strongly recommendable)
The point is: I believe it's mostly the geeks that have used static panels with static start menus for the past 10+ years that have the most problems with gnome-shell.
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In the popular eSports titles (LoL, Dota 2, SC2, CS GO and a few more) there are many competitive female teams and there are also many female tournaments.
However, their skill level is simply far away from that of male teams and the female tournaments are also significantly smaller.
But that's not really a problem.
What's really the problem is the sexism in the community. Often, female teams are only reduced to what their members look like. Going through commets (before the mods clean them up), you can see plenty of evidence of this.
Since I regularly play competitive (CS GO) myself with mixed teams, I just keep witnessing it over and over again. Once you hear a female voice in teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble (with VoIP you can't really hide your gender), there is surely gonna be at least one male players that's gonna make a comment.
Interestingly enough there seem to be many female gamers that kind of enjoy the extra attention too.
But still, there is a significant amount of male gamers that are simply sexist towards female gamers.
One very interesting case is that of the Canadian female SC2 pro gamer Sasha 'Scarlett' Hostyn. Currently she's considered the best foreigner by many (Koreans are Koreans and the rest of the world are foreigners in SC2, because Koreans dominate so hard and there are only few Non-Korean that can keep up with them... barely)
She was born as a male, but feels as a female.
Well sadly, there are many many male players that make a lot of fun of her.
(here a very good article about it from Day9 who's a rather famous SC2 commentator: http://day9.tv/d/Philosopher/a... )
On the CPU, it is trivial to write a triangle-fill algorithm that PERFECTLY anti-aliases the edges by calculating the exact percentage of a pixel the triangle edges cover. Amazingly, this option is NOT implemented in GPU hardware. GPU hardware uses the crude approach of pixel super-sampling- which can be thought of as an increase in the resolution of edge pixels. So, for instance, all 4x GPU anti-aliasing methods effectively increase the resolution of edge pixels by 2 (so a pixel becomes in some sense 2x2 pixels).
Edge coverage calculations, while trivial to implement in hardware, were never considered 'useful' in common GPU solutions.
You can do that with a fragment shader. It's most likely not going to be efficient. But certainly possible.
But that's one of the biggest benefits of GPU. It's not just the huge FLOPs number.
It's to get people to think of implementing solutions in an efficient way.
GPUs are best at what's known as 'embarassingly parallel' problems which means that it's so easy to implement a problem in parallel that it's already embarassing. These days these problems are also known as 'perfectly parallel'.
So the GPU forces people to try to come up with and think about solutions that fit this model.
Many are saying that the banks bent to the US, so the data-centers will too. However, there are a few problems with this comparison and I think it needs to be pointed out that it's quite a different case.
So Switzerland has had strong bank secrecy laws for years. Also, for years these bank secrecy laws have been heavily critisized all around the world. And for years Switzerland has made a lot of money with them, because clients used Swiss banks to avoid taxes, 'possibly' money laundering and such. So these laws have been looked at as rather negative.
So then the financial crisis hit and all of a sudden all the nations were looking for quick and easy money. The US, Germany and many more. Well, it turns out that you can quickly make some money by simply collecting all these taxes that you've missed out on for years. And I mean these clients that tried to avoid taxes by putting their money into Swiss banks simply did something illegal.
So the banks were pressured very hard to release the information. And banks are a very very big deal in Switzerland. I mean the UBS is huge for Switzerland. It's simply the 'too-big-to-fail' company in Switzerland. In order to 'save' the banking business Switzerland didn't have much of a choice then to simply give in.
Now le'ts look at the situation with data-centers:
Firstly, they're far far away from being as big and important as the banks. If the trend keeps going then they will gain importance, but I doubt that data-centers will ever deal with as much money as banks.
Secondly, the privacy laws in Switzerland are not looked at as negative. Instead they're looked at as highly positive and this only got stronger with snowden's leak.
So with the bank secrecy laws it was like the world vs Switzerland. With the privacy laws it's more like the world behind Switzerland vs the US.
Of course with the privacy laws there is the problem that a lot of piracy may happen in those data-centers and that might give the US some attack surface. E.g. the Swiss based firm rapidshare gets under a lot of pressure because of that. But that can still be solved separately from privacy and I don't believe it's comparable to the bank secrecy situation.
And a word about the Swiss intelligence service: Compared to the NSA it's joke.
Obviously the funding of the two isn't comparable at all. The local laws are completely different (we don't have any kind of patriot act).
with n^2 we wouldn't have the NP = P problem^^
http://s14.directupload.net/images/130921/m6gqcywx.gif
Can someone reproduce this?
Next: Biologists find five legged lizards near nuclear plant.
Sometimes I wonder how relevant parallel programming would be with 100GHz - 1000Ghz or more CPUs available.
Noticing an additional 20ms - 30ms of ping doesn't have anything to do with gamer's or humans' reaction time.
Nobody will notice that some opponent dies 20ms - 30ms later than before.
You notice it because the gameplay simply feels differently.
FPS are the most sensitive to ping changes.
RTS & Moba are much more forgiving when it comes to pings.
In FPS it feels like the bullets don't hit where they're supposed to.
Let's say someone sees on his monitor how his crosshair was to the very left of his opponent's head, he shoots.
Now in an additional 20ms - 30ms the opponent can move to the side just enough so that the bullets flies past him without hitting.
You might also notice very small shitters in the opponents movement. That's probably because with a higher latency most people also get slightly more packet loss.
That's one of the biggest advantages of LAN parties, the gameplay simply feels fucking awesome compared to playing on the internet!
This raises the question how much will it cost per GB?
I've installed Ubuntu with gnome-shell for 3 computer illiterate friends.
Once I've explained them that they should always work with the super key (on most keyboards windows key) and if they want to start something just type it into the startmenu (I also installed gnome-do on F4, because it's a little faster and I like it better), then they didn't have any problems with it at all.
(One of that friend actually tried out unity too and even liked it!)
I remember when I first upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 (I think it was that one where gnome2 was removed and unity & gnome-shell were available), I was really disappointed and I really regretted having upgraded.
But I gave it a shot and I started to like it. I often like to use it on my laptop when I'm traveling. (On my desktop I use the i3 tiling window manager, strongly recommendable)
The point is: I believe it's mostly the geeks that have used static panels with static start menus for the past 10+ years that have the most problems with gnome-shell.
Sounds great, I'm looking forward to the project becoming stable :)